2023 in review

It’s time to take the opportunity to review my 2023, a year that has flown by.

Vital statistics

I only published 10 blog posts this year, so didn’t meet my personal target cadence of a post every month. I still enjoy blogging but just haven’t had as many triggers to create posts as in previous years for some reason. My limited activity has probably contributed to the drop in my blog traffic, down by about 40% compared to 2022. Traffic was much heavier during the first quarter than for the rest of the year, reflecting a string of public testing presentations during this time.

One of the most popular posts each year is my critique of the World Quality Report (which I published for the 2020, 2021 and 2022 reports). I missed the recent release of the 2023-24 report, so maybe I’ll get to wading through the latest version early in 2024 and posting my findings as usual!

I’m still on Twitter/X and closed out the year with about 1,250 followers on Twitter, up slightly from last year. I wonder how many testers are still around on this platform and I note that I’m seeing more engagement with my posts on LinkedIn than X now.

Work life

I’ve spent the year working part-time for SSW in my role as Test Practice Lead, the last eight months or so of which have been for a government agency. As my first exposure to government work, it’s been great with an excellent culture and friendly & welcoming colleagues. I’m looking forward to continuing to add value in this role during 2024.

In my own business, Dr Lee Consulting, I’ve focused on my Mentoring offering and have found one-on-one mentoring very rewarding. I find it to be a great learning experience as well as a good opportunity to pass on at least some of what I’ve learned along the way during 25 years in the IT industry. I’m keen to do more in this area, so please let me know if you or your colleagues might be interested in working together. I also launched a new offering, my Second Pair of Eyes service, but have yet to see any traction for it – again, I’d appreciate any leads to kick start this offering.

Testing-related events

I didn’t attend any virtual or in-person testing conferences during 2023, but I did three virtual presentations in the first few months of the year.

First up was an Association for Software Testing (AST) webinar as part of their “Steel Yourselves” series. The idea behind this series is to make the case for a testing idea/concept/approach that you strongly disagree with and I was tasked with defending the need for a testing phase in my session, “Shift Nowhere: A Testing Phase FTW”! I blogged about this experience and you can watch my stab at this difficult task in the second half of the following YouTube video:

I took part in my first “Ask Me Anything” thanks to a webinar by The Test Tribe in which I fielded questions about Exploratory Testing for an hour! This was something new for me and I found it quite challenging, but also enjoyable. I blogged about doing this AMA and a recording of the webinar is on YouTube:

I was pleased to be invited to speak for the Sydney Testers meetup group and I presented a brand new talk, “Lessons Learned in Software Testing” (a deliberate play on the awesome book with the same title) in which I offered a few (potentially contrarian!) lessons I’ve taken away from my long stint in the software testing industry. Thanks to Paul Maxwell-Walters for the invite and it’s great to see Sydney Testers continuing as a large testing community in Australia.

I blogged about my experience of giving this presentation and it was also recorded in full (my talk starts at 32 minutes into the following YouTube video):

I was once again invited to act as a peer advisor for one of Michael Bolton’s virtual “RST Explored” classes running in the Australian timezone. I enjoyed acting in this role back in 2021 and my 2022 experience was great too. I still feel that RST has incredible value and it’s so much more accessible in the virtual format (representing amazing value for money, in my opinion).

Testing books

I made solid progress on the free AST e-book, Navigating the World as a Context-Driven Tester. This book provides responses to common questions and statements about testing from a context-driven perspective, with its content being crowdsourced from the membership of the AST and the broader testing community. I added a further 7 responses in 2023 (bringing the total to 23) and it was good to see a number of new contributors through the year. I will continue to ask for contributions about once a month in 2024. The book is available from the AST’s GitHub.

I failed to publish an updated version of my book An Exploration of Testers during 2023, but hope to do so in 2024. I remain open to additional contributions to this book, so please contact me if you’re interested in telling your story via the answers to the questions posed in the book – and remember that all proceeds from sales of this e-book go to the Association for Software Testing’s excellent Grants program (with another donation from recent sales coming early in 2024).

Reading

My strong reading habit continued during 2023, thanks to the great service from Geelong Regional Libraries. For the first time in many years, I added some fiction into the mix and thoroughly enjoyed doing so. Of the 30-odd books I read this year, the most impactful was From Strength to Strength by Arthur Brooks, while the most engaging fiction came from Hugh Howey’s “Silo” series.

My reading is detailed below (with links to my tweets or blog posts on each of them):

Non-fiction

• Born To Run (Christopher McDougall)
• This Is Marketing (Seth Godin)
• The Blue Zones of Happiness (Dan Buettner)
• The Sports Gene (David Epstein)
• Meltdown (Chris Clearfield & András Tilcsik)
• The Fluoride Deception (Christopher Bryson)
• Silent Spring Revisited (Conor Jameson)
• Living a Committed Life (Lynne Twist)
• When McKinsey Comes to Town (Walt Bogdanich & Michael Forsythe)
• The Carbon Almanac (Seth Godin)
• From Strength to Strength (Arthur Brooks)
• Lockdown (Chip Le Grand)
• Chip War (Chris Miller)
• Different, Not Less (Chloe Hayden)
• The Gap and The Gain (Dan Sullivan & Dr Benjamin Hardy)
• Red Notice (Bill Browder)
• Freezing Order (Bill Browder)
• Excellent Advice for Living (Kevin Kelly)
• Our Final Invention (James Barrat)
• The Daily Stoic (Ryan Holiday)
• Build the Life You Want: The Art and Science of Getting Happier (Arthur Brooks & Oprah Winfrey)
• Billion Dollar Whale (Tom Wright & Bradley Hope)
• Into The Magic Shop (James Doty)

Fiction

• Turtles All The Way Down (John Green)
• Wool (Hugh Howey)
• Shift (Hugh Howey)
• The Mandibles (Lionel Shriver)
• The Last Policeman (Ben Winters)
• Countdown City (Ben Winters)

Volunteering for the UK Vegan Society

I’ve continued to volunteer with the UK’s Vegan Society both as a proofreader and also contributing to their web research efforts. I didn’t tackle many proofreading jobs this year, focusing more on a number of web projects.

I came up with recommendations for changes to the website’s “About Us” page after reviewing many other sites to define what a modern layout and content should look like for the page. I also undertook the mammoth task of reviewing the “Statistics” pages to identify older stats that should be removed as well as researching newer ones to replace them.

The Society is in the process of building a completely new website and I’ve been heavily involved in testing it. It’s been fun to get my hands dirty with some real testing again and it’ll be great to see the new site going live soon!

Outside of my proofreading and web research work, I’ve also written a couple of blog posts, the first was on vegan Christmas desserts and the second on aquafaba! The audience and style are completely different when writing for the Vegan Society so, as a writer, I’m enjoying this challenge and hoping to pen some more blogs for them in 2024.

Working with The Vegan Society is really enjoyable and they handle volunteers very kindly. It was lovely to receive a “thank you” gift of a sponsorship of “Brucey the goose” at Good Heart Animal Sanctuary in recognition of my efforts this year.

In closing

I remain grateful for the attention & support from the readers of my blog and also my followers on other platforms. I wish you all a Happy New Year and I hope you enjoy my posts and other contributions to the testing community to come through 2024.

While I have no confirmed public appearances in 2024 yet, I’m sure I’ll be out and about somewhere either virtually or in-person so I’ll “see you” around…

(Featured image for this post by Jake Weirick on Unsplash)

ER: presenting at the AST’s “Steel Yourselves” webinar (30th January 2023)

I was delighted to be invited to participate in a webinar by the Association for Software Testing as part of their “Steel Yourselves” series. The idea is based on the Steel Man technique and I was required to make the strongest case I could for a claim that I fundamentally disagree with – I chose to argue for “Shift Nowhere: A Testing Phase FTW”!

I had plenty of time to prepare for the webinar and to do my research on the use and abuse of testing phases. I also looked into the “shift left” and “shift right” movements as counterpoints to the traditional notion of the testing phase. Sorting through the various conflicting and contradictory ideas around testing phases was an interesting process in itself. I built a short PowerPoint deck and rehearsed it a couple of times (so thanks to my wife, Kylie, and good mate, Paul Seaman, for being my audience) to make sure I would comfortably fit my arguments for a testing phase into the ten-minute window I would have during the webinar.

January 30th came around quickly and the webinar was timed well for Europe (morning) and Australia (evening) as well as places in-between, so it was good to see an audience from various parts of the world. The session was ably facilitated by James Thomas for the AST and Anne-Marie Charrett went first, to make her case that “Crosby was Right. Quality is Free”. She did a great job, fielded the questions from audience really well and made some good observations on the experience – and concluded right on time at 30 minutes into the session.

I felt like I delivered my short presentation in defence of a testing phase pretty well, getting a few smiles and interesting body language from the audience along the way! There were plenty of questions from James and the audience to challenge my claims and I tried hard to stay “in character” when answering them! The final section of the webinar allowed me to remove the mask and speak freely on my real points of view in this area.

Preparing for and presenting this defence of a testing phase was a challenging and interesting task. As usual, if we’re willing to look past the dogma, there’s usually some useful ideas we can take away from most things. While I disagree that the lengthy, pre-planned, scripted test phases I was often involved in during the early stages of my testing career really offer much value, I think the noise around the “shift left” and “shift right” movements has left a gap in-between where we still need to take pause and allow some humans to interact with the software before unleashing it on customers. (I’ve written about this previously in my blog post, The Power of the Pause.) Thanks to the AST for the opportunity to present at this webinar and give myself a refresher on this particular area of testing.

A recording of this “Steel Yourselves” webinar, along with plenty more awesome content, can be found on the AST YouTube channel.

My first two (free!) testing community events of 2023

I’ve got a couple of testing community events coming up to kick off 2023. Both are free to attend and are interactive, so I’d love to see some of my blog audience getting involved!

30 January 2023 (8pm AEDT): Steel Yourselves webinar

First up is a webinar for the Association for Software Testing as part of their interesting series called “Steel Yourselves”, in which testers make the strongest case they can for claims they fundamentally disagree with.

In this webinar, I will argue the case for a testing phase, hence the title of my talk, “Shift Nowhere: a Testing Phase FTW”. After I make my case, the audience will have the chance to challenge my point of view and finally I’ll reflect on the experience of having to make a case for something I disagree with.

This webinar will also feature another well-respected Australian tester, with Anne-Marie Charrett presenting her case that “Crosby was Right. Quality is Free”.

I’m looking forward to this very different kind of webinar and have been busy putting my case together and practising my 10-minute presentation. It will certainly be interesting to deal with the challenges coming from the audience (“interesting” also encompassing “well out of my comfort zone”!).

Register for the AST Steel Yourselves webinar

8 March 2023 (9.30pm AEDT): Ask Me Anything on Exploratory Testing

My second online event is for The Test Tribe, as part of their “Ask Me Anything” series, in which I’ll be fielding audience questions about exploratory testing. This is a topic I’m passionate about and I have extensive experience of using exploratory testing as an approach, so I hope I can help others get a better understanding of the approach and its power during this session.

This is again something quite different for me as I generally present a prepared presentation of some kind, whereas in this case I don’t know what the audience will ask. I expect this to be quite a challenging experience but I’m excited to share my knowledge and experience on this oft-misunderstood topic.

Register for The Test Tribe AMA

I hope you can join me on the 30th January for “Steel Yourselves” and also on 8th March for “Ask Me Anything”! Please use the following links to register:

Register for the AST Steel Yourselves webinar

Register for The Test Tribe AMA

Attending the AST’s virtual “lean coffee” (September 21, 2022)

The Association for Software Testing ran another lean coffee over a Zoom meeting on 21st September, designed primarily for the European timezone (in their morning) but also again being convenient for me to attend in Australia.

For anyone unfamiliar with the concept of a Lean Coffee, it’s an agenda-less meeting in which the participants gather, build an agenda and then talk about the topics one by one (usually with a timebox around each topic, which can be extended if there’s energy around it).

After my good experience of their first virtual lean coffee on May 24, I was really looking forward to this session – and it was certainly well worth attending.

This lean coffee was facilitated by new AST board member Trisha Chetani using Miro. We spent a chunk of time at the start of the session getting set up in Miro, suggesting topics for discussion and then voting on them (again a process we had to learn in Miro).

It was a larger group in this session than last time, which had it pros and cons. There were more topics to choose from and more diverse opinions & experiences being shared, but there was also the inevitable Zoom meeting “talking over each other” issue which made some of the discussions a little frustrating. It was good to find myself not being the only Australian in attendance with Anne-Marie Charrett joining the session and also great to see a wide range of tester experience, from newbies to, erm, more established testers.

We covered the following three topics in the lean coffee:

• Teaching developers about testing
• A book, blog or podcast that inspired you recently
• How can a test team show their value?

I enjoyed the session and the topics we managed to discuss. The hour went really quickly and I got some valuable different perspectives especially on the final topic we covered. Thanks to the AST for organizing this session at a time that was reasonable for folks on my side of the world to attend. I’m looking forward to more lean coffees in the future (when hopefully we’ve nailed down the tech so we can focus most of the hour on what we all love, talking testing!).

Note that one of the lean coffee attendees, AST board member James Thomas, has penned an excellent blog which covers the content of the discussions from this session in some detail.

My first virtual “lean coffee” (May 24, 2022)

The Association for Software Testing ran a lean coffee over a Zoom meeting on 24th May, designed primarily for the European timezone (in their morning) but also being convenient for me to attend in Australia.

While I’ve attended Lean Coffee sessions at conferences and other events over the years, this was my first experience of this style of meeting in a virtual format. For those unfamiliar with the concept of a Lean Coffee, it’s an agenda-less meeting in which the participants gather, build an agenda and then talk about the topics one by one (usually with a timebox around each topic, which can be extended if there’s energy around it).

The meeting was facilitated by Joel Montvelisky using Lean Coffee Table and we all learned our way around the tool as we went along. It was a small but very engaged group, and it felt like the perfect size for me to both learn from others as well as feeling comfortable to contribute in (what I hope was) a meaningful way to the discussions.

We covered the following four topics in the lean coffee:

• Why do people want to speak at conferences, and can we support them to get what they need in other ways?
• What one thing would you prefer never to have to do again (as a tester)?
• Working conditions for testers
• Tactics for learning while testing

The virtual experience was of course a little different to an in-person one. Firstly, it was later in the day for me so well past the time I’d want to be drinking coffee! But, more seriously, I think the format lends itself well to the virtual environment and perhaps enables more reserved participants to engage more easily than in a physical meeting.

I really enjoyed the session, the time went really quickly and I felt like I got some interesting different perspectives in pretty much all of the topics we covered. I thank the AST for organizing it at a time that was reasonable for folks on my side of the world to attend and I hope to see attend lean coffees in the future (and also hope to see more Aussies and Kiwis in attendance!).

Note that one of the lean coffee attendees, AST board member James Thomas, has penned an excellent blog which covers the content of the discussions from this session in some detail.

Donation of proceeds from sales of “An Exploration of Testers” book

In October 2020, I published my first software testing book, “An Exploration of Testers”. As I mentioned then, one of my intentions with this project was to generate some funds to give back to the testing community (with 100% of all proceeds I receive from book sales being returned to the community).

I’m delighted to announce that I’ve now made my first donation as a result of sales so far, based on royalties for the book in LeanPub to date:

(Note that there is up to a 45-day lag between book sales and my receipt of those funds, so some recent sales are not included in this first donation amount.)

I’ve personally rounded up the royalties paid so far (US$230.93) to form a donation of US$250 (and covered their processing fees) to the Association for Software Testing for use in their excellent Grant Program. I’m sure these funds will help meetup and peer conference organizers greatly in the future.

I will make further donations of royalties received from book sales not covered by this first donation.

“An Exploration of Testers” is available for purchase via LeanPub and a second edition featuring more contributions from great testers around the world should be coming soon. My thanks to all of the contributors so far for making the book a reality and also to those who’ve purchased a copy, without whom this valuable donation to the AST wouldn’t have been possible.

ER of presenting at DDD Melbourne By Night meetup (10th September 2020)

In response to a tweet looking for speakers for an online meetup organized by DDD Melbourne By Night, I submitted an idea – “Testing is not dead!” – and it was accepted.

I had a few weeks to prepare for this short (ten-minute) talk and went through my usual process of sketching out the content in a mindmap first (using the free version of XMind), then putting together a short slide deck (in PowerPoint) to cover that content.

I find it harder to nail down my content for short talks like this than for a typical longer conference track talk. The restricted time forces focus and I landed on just a few key points: looking at the claims of “testing is dead”, defining what “testing” means to me (and contrasting with “checking”), where automation fits in, and wrapping up with a few tips for non-specialist testers (as this is primarily a meetup with a developer audience).

I did two practice runs of the talk over the same conference call technology that the meetup would be using (Zoom), even though my willing audience of one (my wife) was only in the next room at home! I find practice runs to be an essential part of my preparation and I was pleased to find both runs coming in very close to the ten-minute timebox.

The September DDD by Night meetup took place on the evening of 10th September and featured nine lightning talks with some preamble and also time for questions between each talk. I was third up on the bill and managed to whizz through my talk in a few seconds under ten minutes! The content seemed to be well received and some of my ideas were clearly new to this audience, so I was pleased to have the opportunity to spread my opinion about testing to a different part of the Melbourne tech community.

It was also great to see Vanessa Morgan as a first-time presenter during this meetup and her talk was a very polished performance.

Thanks to the DDD Melbourne crew for putting on meetup events during these interesting times and, as a newcomer, the friendly community spirit in this group was obvious.

You can watch my talk on YouTube.

Kevlin Henney at the “Software Art Thou?” meetup (Melbourne, 7th March 2019)

The latest in Zendesk’s excellent “Software Art Thou?” meetup series saw the UK’s Kevlin Henney addressing a packed house (of over 100) in Melbourne on the evening of 7th March.

Kevlin is an independent consultant, speaker, writer and trainer. His development interests are in patterns, programming, practice and process. He is co-author of A Pattern Language for Distributed Computing and On Patterns and Pattern Languages, two volumes in the Pattern-Oriented Software Architecture series. He is also editor of 97 Things Every Programmer Should Know and 97 Things Every Java Programmer Should Know.

The talk was advertised as follows:

“It’s just semantics.” How many conversations about philosophy, politics and programming are derailed by this thought-stopping comment?

Semantics is all about meaning. If there is one thing we struggle with and need to get better at, it is the search for and clarification of meaning. The world in which a software system lives is filled with meaning. The structure, concepts and names that inform the code, its changes and the mental models held by developers and others business roles are expressions of meaning. The very act of development is an exercise in meaning — its discovery, its formulation, its communication. Paradigms, processes and practices are anchored in different ways of thinking about and arriving at meaning.

But just because we are immersed in concepts of meaning from an early age, and just because the daily work of software development is about wrangling meaning, and just because it’s just semantics, that doesn’t mean we’re necessarily good at it. It takes effort and insight. Let’s talk about what we mean.

Kevlin’s talk was titled “What do you mean?” which he quickly modified to “WTF do you mean?”. He kicked off by talking about abstraction and this quote from Dijkstra:

The purpose of abstraction is not to be vague but to create a new semantic level in which one can be absolutely precise

He pointed out that when we’re criticized for trying to be precise with language with statements such as “It’s just semantics”, we need to remember that this literally means”It’s just meaning” so why wouldn’t we seek that?!

Turning specifically to software development, Kevlin argued that code, tests, scripts, etc. are all “code”, literally the codification of knowledge. Software development, to him, is a process of knowledge acquisition through learning, communication and social negotiation. Software architecture is a model of participation with design comprising synthesis and analysis (which are opposites of each other).

An Ernest Hemingway quote came next:

The only kind of writing is rewriting

Kevlin argued that software development is the production of variation, it’s not manufacturing – kudos to him for this messaging, it’s still all too common to see this ill-placed manufacturing/factory model placed on software development and it leads to nonsense like “Quality Assurance” when we really should be talking about testing. He also made the good point that what we do is straddling natural and programming languages.

Kevlin said that the domain (whatever it is) always looks very different from the inside and that:

Your customer doesn’t mean what they say

They use their terms and context, they leave out significant details (what they don’t say), they make assumptions, and actually don’t know what they want in the first place (it’s just a property of humans)!

As an argument for iterative development and the idea of slowing down to become faster, he quoted Neil Gaiman:

You learn from finishing things

There is a big difference between speed and velocity, with the latter being overloaded by the agile community. He claimed speed often leads to us “building the wrong thing brilliantly” rather than going slower in the right direction.

He made another excellent point as he was close to finishing up around our modern fascination with “prioritizing by business value”, with the suggestion we say “estimated business value” as this judgement of value is itself prone to error.

This was a very professionally-delivered talk, serious in nature but delivered with anecdotes and some dry British humour along the way, supported by a very nice slide deck.

Zendesk always put on a great meetup and this was no exception. Their space is large and airy with excellent audio visual facilities plus they lay on a lot of finger food and a well-stocked (and varied) bar service. The quality of their presenters is also always top notch and, although I wasn’t familiar with Kevlin and his work, this was a really engaging (even after talking non-stop for seventy minutes!) and interesting talk on a topic that gets scant treatment in the software development industry – and also in testing, specifically. Many of us in the context-driven testing community are often accused of playing semantic games but, as Kevlin ably demonstrated, conveying meaning is critically important and genuinely difficult to do well.

Pre-TiCCA19 conference meetup

In the weeks leading up to the Testing in Context Conference Australia 2019, our thoughts turned to how we might sneak in a meetup event alongside the conference to make the most of the fact that Melbourne would be home to so many awesome testers at the same time.

Thanks to the conference venue – the Jasper Hotel – giving us use of one of our workshop rooms for an evening and also food & drink sponsorship by House of Test (Switzerland), the meetup became feasible and a bit of social media advertising coupled with a free Eventbrite campaign led to about twenty keen testers (including a number of TiCCA19 conference speakers) assembling at the Jasper on the evening of Thursday 28th February.

Some pre-meetup networking gave people the chance to make new friends as well as giving the conference speakers a chance to meet some of their fellow presenters. After I gave a very brief opening, it was time for the content to kick off in the shape of a presentation by well-known and respected Kiwi context-driven tester, Aaron Hodder. His talk was titled “Inclusive Collaboration – how our differences can make the difference” in which he explored how having a neurodiverse workforce can give you a competitive edge, and how the workplace can respect diverse needs and different requirements for interaction and collaboration to bring out the best in everyone’s differences. This was a beautifully-crafted talk, delivered with Aaron’s unique blend of personal connection to the topic and a smattering of self-deprecation, while still driving home a hard-hitting message. (Aaron also shared some great resources on Inclusive Collaboration at https://goo.gl/768M0u).

A short networking break then gave everyone the chance to mingle some more and clean up the remains of the food, before we kicked off the panel session. Ably facilitated by Rich Robinson, the panel consisted of four TiCCA19 speakers, in the shape of Graeme Harvey, Aaron Hodder, Sam Connelly and Ben Simo. The conversation was driven by a few questions from Rich: How have you seen the testing role change in your career? How do you think the testing role will change into the future? Is the manual testing role dead? The resulting 45-minute discussion between the panel and audience was engaging and interesting – and kudos to Rich for such a great job in running the panel.

We enjoyed putting this meetup on for the Melbourne testing community and the feedback from everyone involved was very positive, so thanks again to everyone who made it happen.

Attending the pre-TestBash Sydney Testers meetup

Arriving in Sydney the day before our presentation at the Ministry of Testing‘s TestBash Australia 2018 conference allowed me (along with Paul Seaman) to attend the pre-TestBash meetup organized by the well-known Sydney Testers group.

The meetup was held in the offices of Gumtree, up on the 22nd floor of the tower at 1 York Street in the CBD. On entering their office, the most striking feature was the simply stunning view it affords their lucky employees of the famous Sydney Harbour Bridge. The other noticeable thing about this relatively newly-renovated space for the company is that it has been furnished using items themselves sourced from the Gumtree platform, so no cookie-cutter corporate office furnishings here!

It was good to see a decent crowd of about thirty people enjoying the free food and drinks before the “main event”, viz. Trish Koo with her short presentation on “The Future of Testing”. She covered some interesting predictions in her talk, including:

• Exploratory Testing will be really weird
• End to end testing will become meaningless
• Black box testing will be cool again
• Testers may be the only ones who can stop the robot apocalypse

This was at least a very different treatment compared to the many similarly-named talks out there. Her hand-drawn slides were another point of difference and she certainly got some interesting reactions from the audience! The Q&A afterwards was engaging, but still left ample time for us all to mingle before we formally overstayed our welcome at Gumtree!

It was good to see Richard Bradshaw there representing Ministry of Testing as well as TestBash Australia conference organizers, David Greenlees and Anne-Marie Charrett. Thanks to Sam Connelly and the Sydney Testers crew for putting on a good meetup in the run up to TestBash, it’s always good to mingle with the local testing community before a major event in another city.

(First three photos above from Michele Playfair, the last one from Paul Maxwell-Walters.)